Simon Cooper

speaker

334 appearances 5 recordings 4 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 10 Jul

Simon Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 4.

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The David McWilliams Podcast · Why Social Democracies Win World Cups · 9 Jun 2026 podcast

78th minute, Dick Nonnenka, Dutch substitute centre-forward, who is a flower seller in daily life because several of the Dutch players are semi-pros.

So he has a flower stall in a small town.

He heads the equaliser.

Last minute of extra time, Rob Rensenblink, brilliant, the snake, they called him, the snake man, hits the outside of the post.

So the Netherlands could have won a World Cup final my first time of asking.

So I grew up in Dutch football, which is obviously the highest form of football, which later became the world's form of football, played by teams like Klops Liverpool or Pep's Manchester City.

So, yeah, I have the origin story.

So the Netherlands is a social democracy, which is the best way to produce a good national football team.

And that's true, of course, in most of Western Europe, France, Germany, Spain.

With football, you can't see at age six who's going to be good.

It's not like basketball rowing where you pick the biggest kids with the biggest parents and you put top coaches on them.

football obviously physical build doesn't really signify much look at messy so the way to produce a really good football team is to get all the six-year-olds in your country playing football and then when they're 18 you find out who's good and that means that football has to be available to everyone it has to be cheap and you have to have trained coaches so that's what my children in france have the same experience france is now the leading football country in the world

And that's why Western Europe has dominated World Cups for the last 20 years, only one country on Earth.

So Western Europe's 5% of the world's population.

The whole rest of humanity has produced one team in the last 20 years that's reached the top three of World Cups, Leo Messi's Argentina.

So you need Messi to be as good as Croatia, Portugal, Holland, Belgium.

So social democracy is crucial.

I grew up, like most Dutch boys at the time, girls didn't play then, they do now, playing on a field that was kept by the local council, you know, watered and mown.

Membership was very cheap.

Our coaches all had diplomas from, you know, national coaching courses.

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